I didn’t know Wordpress could cause such a headache, but it did today.  I got the white screen of death and was left with lots of admin side issues.

What happens is you can’t login, or, if you were previously logged in, you can’t mange plugins. All you can do is get a blank white screen.  Even the WYSIWYG editor would not load.

I think what it had to do with automatically updating pugins in Wordpress 2.6  I don’t know why, but it made Wordpress very unhappy.

Lucky for me, I had all the plugins backed up and was able to delete all my plugin files and re-upload the old ones.  Yes they are all begging to be upgraded again, but the blog is working and that’s much more important.

Thanks to Get Found Now for writing about the issue.  Their article lead me to my own conclusion that worked.

Every day hackers sit out there an pray on good sites for no good reason.  Some days they are even successful.  In the past few months I’ve worked with a few blogs to detect and remove hidden code that was causing various unwanted issues.  It happens to the best of blogs, and knowing how to find and remove it is just as important as trying to prevent it.

Blog #1 - The iFrame - The first indicator that something was wrong here was the time it took the blog to load.  It seemed abnormally long.  I popped open Safari’s activity window and noticed it was connecting out to an IP address that I didn’t recognize.

When the did finally load, it then asked me if I wanted to run a Java applet.  Huge red flag there.  It took some digging but I found a lot of files contained some iFrame code that was loading badware from an external site.

To fix, I deleted and re-uploaded all the files I could, and walked though each theme and plugin file to find any traces of code that should not be there.  Once cleaned out, the site ran much smoother.

Upgrading to a newer version of Wordpress isn’t to complicated, however some precautions should be taken. The list below is a bit more detailed that Wordpress provides, but I’m just trying to line item out everything.

Prerequisites:

• FTP access.
• Blog admin access.
• 10-30 minutes for most blogs. This is also dependent on how big the blog is and how many plugins the blog has. Webhosting and internet connection speed can also play a big part.

Notes:

• No other authors should be in the blog during the upgrade. If they are, it probably won’t hurt anything, but they’ll be confused as it won’t work correctly.
• Not all plugins are always compatible with newer versions of Wordpress; especially when it’s a larger update. It would be a good idea to visit each plugin’s homepage to ensure it’s compatible. Wordpress also tries to keep a list, such as the Wordpress 2.5 plugin compatibility list. If a plugin is not compatible, either wait to upgrade until after the plugin is updated, or find an alternative.

Upgrading:

1. Backup your blog’s database. Grab the Wordpress Database Backup plugin and use that to run backups via the Wordpress admin. It’s simple to install and easy to use.

Blog are just like any computer in the fact that they are only as good, and secure, as the software on them. Keeping your blog software up to date is important, but so is keeping your plugins and third party code updated.

Updating your blog’s plugins can give your blog a few advantages:

• Additional features if the plugin is a major update.
• Security fixes.
• Optimized plugin code that runs faster and more efficient.
• Better compatibility with the blog software or other plugins.
• Better compatibility with third party sites if it’s part of another service.

Don’t feel bad if you don’t update your plugins as it’s quite hard to keep them up to date; especially if you have a lot of them. Some plugins have update notifiers in them, others now tie back into Wordprss.org to look for updates. But that’s just the update notification, they all require some time and effort to download and update.

De-activing plugins is a lot easier, unless you actually have to modify the code, and doing so has its benefits.

• It can speed up the blog as it has fewer scripts to run or plugins to load.

Well it’s out, Wordpress 2.3 has hit the internet and it packs a few great new features along with internal code cleanup and bug squashing. Here are a few of the highlights to the release.

1) Advanced Editor
The WYSIWYG editor evolves and now includes eleven new ‘advanced’ functions. Just hit the little colored squares icon on the right of the main toolbar and you’ll get the additional buttons.

Included are:
Format dropdown for header tags.
Underline
Align Full
Text Color
Paste as plain text.
Paste from Word. Fixing my previous complaint.
Clear Formatting.
Clean Up Code. OMG I think I’m in love.
Special characters.
Undo and Redo.

2) Tagging
Ultimate Tag Warrior is no longer needed now that Wordpress will do tagging. Actually, Ultimate Tag Warrior had many more features so I guess it can’t be ruled out all together. But the new tagging functionality is nice. I can see people getting confused with tags and categories now as they are very similar.

A nice touch is the ability for Wordpess’ tagging system to import tags from other plugins. The Wordpress team was really thinking on this one.

As blogs become more and more mainstream, issues are coming up that blog software is not quite ready to take on. One of them is formatting issues created by copying and pasting content from Microsoft Word, Explorer, Outlook or even from Firefox!

The issue is that users are creating or finding content with other programs, then copying and pasting it into the WYSIWYG editor in their blog software. When that happens, the editor does it’s best to keep the same formatting including fonts, font sizes, line spacing, colors and much more. Any content copied from a Microsoft document will also come across with hidden, Microsoft only, tags such as the <o:p> and [endif] tags. This formatting then overrides the blogs default font, size and formatting tags giving your blog an inconsistent look and feel.

Here are a few examples:

The first one is what the code looks like when copied from Word. Can you tell what it says?

The second one is what the code should look like in Wordpress’ WYSIWYG editor. Much nicer.

Here are a few of the inconsistent layout options that can result. There are different fonts, sizes and use bolding.

Wordpress.com is all the rage, but Blogger has been around for quite a while and there are a few perks to using it. Here are a few I could come up with.

1. Editable Templates - No extra fee here, you can customize your Blogger templates to meet your needs.
2. Easier Widgets - This one comes from Anthony who feels that the ability to add widgets (or page elements) to Blogger is easier than over at Wordpress.
3. AdSense - Blogger makes adding ads quite easy. Before you know it, you’ll be making a quarter a day!
4. Video Upload - Currently in draft mode, but Blogger is going to allow direct video uploading into your post. The functionality is much like you already do for images. Sadly it doesn’t also publish to YouTube from what I can tell.
5. FeedBurner - FeedBurner functionality is built right in now that Google owns FeedBurner. More integration is probably coming too.
6. Publish via FTP - This is a big one, the ability to FTP your files to a directory on your own site is great. This means you can host your own blog, on your own site, regardless of your server setup.

The Sphinn Dashboard Widget has been updated!

New in this version include the ability to choose between ‘Hot Sphinns’ and ‘New Sphinns’. You can also open two widgets and have each one showing different content so you never miss a thing.

The Mac widget can be downloaded on the Sphinn Dashboard Widget page.

[tags]sphinn, mac, dashboard, apple, widget[/tags]

Sphinn is showing up everywhere and, if you have a Mac, why not put it on your Dashboard with the Sphinn Dashboard Widget!?

The Sphinn Dashboard Widget pulls the ‘Hot Today’ and ‘New’ lists from the RSS feeds and displays them in the widget. This will help you keep up to date on the most popular or newest Sphinn topics without leaving your desktop.

A big thanks goes out to Fernando-Graphicos.com for putting up the basic feed reader tutorial.

Post any issues or feature requests in the comments and I’ll see what I can do.

Download the Sphinn Dashboard Widget. - Mac Only.

[tags]sphinn,mac,dashboard,apple,widget[/tags]

Safari 3, now for Mac and PC, recently came out in beta form. Included in this release was the ability for users to use visual editors also know as WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors. No longer do Safari users have to know code to make basic formatting in blog posts.

Safari 3.0.1 Beta on Windows XP

I’ve tested it in Wordpress 2.2 and it works great.* As far as I understand, previous versions of Wordpress don’t support Safari’s rich text editing. Testing it out under 2.0.10 confirms this.

I also tested out Blogger and had no issues. They seem to be on board with the Safari 3 crowd too.

TypePad however didn’t seem to support rich text editing with Safari yet.

With Safari 3 being so new, and brand new to the Windows world, blog software creators are working in Safari support as they feel the need.

If you use TypePad, or other software that doesn’t support Safari’s rich text editing yet, drop and email to their support so they know your interested.